Laughing Sun: Cander released to Bandcamp

Cander released to Bandcamp? After all these years? Surely not!

Yes, it’s true. Cander has been released to Bandcamp at last, after many, many months of this being promised in the ‘coming soon’ section of the Wud Records homepage.

Cander is a seminal 1985 recording lifted from a 38-year-old cassette. As such it will never match today’s perfect squeaky clean audio of the mainstream radio. It is what it is, with wrong notes and passing lorries and all included. And it sounds a whole lot better than it did before we played with it!

According to the cover notes, Cander was recorded on 4th and 11th September 1985. It is the earliest recording of Laughing Sun in existence, as far as we know.

Cander features the teenage musical talents of Pok, George, Grape and Ken. We hear them trying out a variety of some of Pok‘s most classic early songs, when those songs were still in their young days.

The songs on Cander are a few of the songs that these young gentlemen had played from time to time since the days of Now. They had been performed live at Sidmouth International Folk Festival earlier that summer. There is also a cover of Hawkwind‘s Master of the Universe in the collection, a song the ensemble loved and had jammed on many occasions.

A couple of other songs were on the original cassette as well, including The Centre of the Cyclone and some odd bits of jamming. Unfortunately they are of such poor quality that we decided to exclude them from the release.

A new version of The Centre of the Cyclone is in the works and will be included in Pok’s Anthology album. Several of the Cander songs already appear on Pok‘s Anthology, and a few others are still in the works and waiting to be added.

Cander has already been available to hear and enjoy at our website and on SoundCloud for several years. Following the recent upgrade to the control room, this was an early sandbox experiment to try things out with the new studio monitors.

We have been experimenting with various recordings to see what can be achieved. Another of our experiments, The Subterraineans Demo, was added to Bandcamp a little over a month ago.

Pok’s fabulous artwork for the front cover depicts “an informal moment at number 31”. After all, Cander is a Wud Dictionary term, meaning ‘a meeting of friends after a long time apart’. Pok’s unique drawing style is highly distinctive and we are very fond of his amazing creations.

Other versions of some Cander songs were revived by both Alchemeon and the temporary “electric elves” reimagining of the Spacegoats. We cordially invite you to enjoy listening to both.

As well as upgrading the audio for Cander‘s Bandcamp release, we have also updated all of the different song and album web pages across various websites. These include Bandcamp, SoundCloud and our partners at Explicit Music. Now you can read the backstories to each song as well as the whole album as you enjoy listening.

With more audio upgrades and plenty of new releases coming soon, we highly recommend you bookmark our linktastic News pages, join our Bandcamp community, and follow us on Twitter, where we make all such announcements.

If you would like to listen to or download Cander from Bandcamp, please click here.